Thursday, July 07, 2011

Postgraduate Certificates in Tertiary Teaching

Having completed a short course in university teaching, I was keen to learn more about how to design and deliver courses at the tertiary level. While I have been teaching at ANU for ten years, in a classroom and on-line, I would like to study what works and why, in detail.

Australian National University

The obvious program is the ANU's own "Graduate Certificate in Higher Education". This has similar content to the programs offered by other universities, with an emphasis on a constructivist approach, action learning, student centered learning, formative feedback, community of practice and reflection. One point of difference is that the ANU offers a course in "Research Supervision" (EDUC8004), appropriate to the university's leading role in research.

The ANU courses are delivered in intensive and blended modes. However, my interests lie in e-learning and so it is worth looking at other institutions which specialize in distance education.

However, the course suffers from being a consortium approach, making the administrative details complex. Also the course has blended components, that is some of it is delivered face-to-face, which makes the logistics of study much more difficult.

It should be noted that these university teaching programs do not generally qualify the student to teach at a primary or secondary school. Schools have much more rigorous requirements for education of their teachers than universities (plus the requirement for a police check).